I was thinking about fantasy baseball today after watching Knocked up. I am not much of a sports fan so I started thinking about a philosphy version of this stuff. So, let’s say you were the chair of your won philosophy department. What would your fantasy department look like? Let’s say that you only get 10 faculty. My picks would be as follows
1. Kent Bach
2. David Rosenthal
3. Austen Clark
4. Stephen Neale
5. Michael Devitt
6. Bill Lycan
7. Stephan Darwall
8. Ned Block
9. John Searle
10. Ruth Millikan
I guess we need some rules to, like points for books published and conference presentations…what would be your picks?
Richard Brown 
Wow, I would strangle myself in your fantasy department; the history program is really, really awful, given that only Darwall prevents it from being a total collapse — and he has to do double-duty for history and ethics both.
I have to go now, but I’ll try to remember to put up mine when I next have the chance.
And it’s up, because I just had to do it anyway.
🙂 yeah, my department is consciousness centered…though Rosenthal does some history…and I see I am already not following the rules, since I have two poeple from the department that I am getting my PhD from…should we really have that rule, if so I have got to make some changes…
I don’t think it’s necessary; I just did it to make things easier to choose.
i liked your idea, but fantasy baseball (i’m a huge fan…) works on statistics. so, we would have to begin there. and, it seems that in the philmindlanguage category, your department would score high, but otherwise would be far below the mendoza line. maybe we could develop some statistical categories that were parallel between baseball and philosophy. HRs = published books? RBIs = advised dissertations that produced tenure track hires? ERA = unsuccessful replies to fundamental objections? good idea, RBrown.
Yo jmcd, that’s R. W. H. Brown to you! 🙂
But good, I am glad we got someone who knows how fantasy baseball works interested to help work out some details!
Uh, what a ‘mendoza line’ is that a statistical concept I don’t know about?
I like your categories but I don’t really know what and ERA is…is that ‘earned run average’? But following your general line of thought we would have something like;
Home Runs=published books with major presses (OUP, MIT, Oxford, etc)
RBI=advised dissertation of someone who gets a (top 20?) tenure track job
Base Hit=Invited talk or keynote address (with prestige of invitation correlating to single, double, triple…so being invited to give the Locke lectures at Oxford is a triple, being invited to do a Author meets critic at the apa a double, etc)
So those are your batter-like stats, but we also need defenive play-like states as well, right? Like, double plays, and errors, etc. Perhaps something like
An out=fundamental objection to some position (e.g. Quine’s arg. against the analytic/synthetic, or Block and Fodor’s arg’s in Trouble with Functionalism).
A pop-fly is a question begging argument
How do these stats get assigned points?
Should we have Fantasy conferences where our departments compete?
Have you put up your Fantasy department yet? If so put a link to here so we can all compare!!
Is there an online index of living philosophers and the fields in which they work?
I don’t know if there is…I think the closest thing would be something like Brian Leiter’s list of Faculty in Top 50 philosophy depatments…or his Phil Gourmet specialty site and then go to the depatment…
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